Science and technology

Popular music

Tomfoolery

MENTION Tom Lehrer to a geek, and the response is a predictable ditty. "There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium...", and all the other elements through nobelium. Your correspondent will, unprompted, belt out the tune, as will Daniel Radcliffe, who performed a rapid-fire version on "The Graham Norton Show" in 2010.

Dr Lehrer, a retired professor of mathematics who taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Cruz, turned 84 this week, and has not performed in public (bar a few special events) for over 40 years. Yet his proto-geek musical comedy skits, recorded and performed live in the 1950s and 1960s, remain in vogue among his modern intellectual descendents. Each generation of nerds inculcates the next. In 2010 a massive retrospective collection containing CDs and a DVD of a performance for Norwegian television in the 1960s was released, making the material more comprehensively available. A set of his songs lightly shaped into an evening's performance, "Tomfoolery", was first produced in 1980.

The songs Dr Lehrer composed range from politically incisive, through gloriously scientific, to ones so ribald that radio stations of the day demurred at playing them. As a maths professor, he brought well-honed scorn to the ridiculous "New Math", a trendy teaching technique in the 1960s that introduced toddlers to set theory and alternate bases, and ruined a generation of students on basic operations. ("Base 8 is just like base 10. If you're missing two fingers...It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it.")

This Babbage first learned of Dr Lehrer's oeuvre in high school, from a sociology teacher, of all people. At a summer debate camp, Babbage sang duets with a Jesuit priest in training. We covered such numbers as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" ("We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment, except for the few we take home to experiment.") and one about nuclear proliferation in the cold war ("Egypt's going to get one, too, just to use on you-know-who").

Dr Demento (a radio-show host less well known as Barret Eugene Hansen) helped keep Dr Lehrer's music alive over the many decades in which his novelty-song programme has aired. (He also brought "Weird Al" Yankovic to the public eye.) The mix of dry and broad wit and the delight with which the singing professor skewered and lampooned sex, science, education, popular music and politics explain his enduring appeal.

For Babbage, Dr Lehrer's music has become a shibboleth of sorts. If a chorus of "First we got the bomb, and that was good, 'cause we love peace and brotherhood" is not met with "Then Russia got the bomb, and that's okay, 'cause the balance of power's maintained that way," your correspondent's eyes narrow. You don't know Mr Lehrer's love children, the band They Might Be Giants and singer Jonathan Coulton, either? And you call yourself a geek?

One wonders if Lehrer's popularity was much more widespread in the 1950s and 1960s precisely because appreciation and approval for science (and engineering) in general was more widespread. It was, after all, a time when you had candidates for Congress (and the Presidency) waxing eloquent about how we needed more and better sicence education.

Only when science came to be regarded, by significant sectors of the population, as a problem rather than a solution did his works become more of a specialized geek-speak phenomena.

I liked that he looked nuclear annihilation in the face and laughed. “We’ll all go together when we go…every Hottentot and every Eskimo!” Thanks Babbage for reviving great memories of sitting in the ‘70s suburban basement of the kid with the ‘cool parents’ and listening to their Tom Lehrer records all night.

My personal favorite is, "So long mom, I'm off to drop the bomb, so don't wait up for me." We sang National Brotherhood Week at a camp flag raising:
Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It's American as apple pie.
But during National Brotherhood week, National Brotherhood Week,
New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans 'cause it's very chic.
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand.
You can tolerate him if you try.
Our counselor used to sing us The Masochism Tango.
Why when you edit does your editor strip the line feeds?

Lehrer is a very effective artist, insofar as he is able to make important political points humourously. Listening to his music also provides some interesting insight into the prevailing mindset at the time - for instance, perspectives on the appropriate international role of Germany.

I had TWTYTW memorized by age 9; my parents have a lot to answer for.
Because my father's name is Ivan, I was always disappointed that none of the boys in the family were named Nickolai.
I proposed marriage by mail. I nearly addressed the letter to "Occupant" (it was included in a larger package) but that would have spoiled the surprise: the object of my affections was also conversant with the oeuvre.
But what makes me sad is how relevant his songs still are. I spent much of the entire US invasion of Panama with "Send the Marines" as an earworm. Especially "They've got to be protected, all their rights respected, till somebody we LIKE can be elected." These days it's "Who's Next" with slight modification.